Listen up ladies – you’re gross! Well, maybe not all of your body, just the lady bits. Yup, I am talking about your vagina, or more accurately, your vulva, because I mean the whole kit and caboodle, inside and out, the hairy and the moist. But if anatomically precise language is not to your liking we can call it a vajayjay, cunt, snatch, pussy or whatever you like.

There seems to be a lot of vagina bashing going on lately. I mean figuratively, not literally, and for these small mercies we must be grateful.
Last month an Indian company released a cream called ‘18 Again’ promising to turn your lady parts into a virginal promised land, a sort of ‘pimp my ride’, but for pussies – and yes, the pun was intentional. That’s pretty awful although perhaps not as bad as ‘Clean & Dry Intimate Wash’ – a product sold across South East Asia that promises to whiten up your vajayjay.
Ah, but that’s South East Asia you say, where social class and status is tied to skin colour. The advert works on the troublingly racist assumption that a coffee-coloured vagina is less respectable than a white one. Not a problem that affects most Irish women, sure – but then perhaps ours are too white. If so, there’s a product called ‘My New Pink Button’, which comes in four shades to tint your lady bits. Whoops all ‘round! Because we all want a chemically-induced princess pink pussy, don’t we?
While it could be argued that extreme waxing, such as the Brazilian or Hollywood wax, are pro-vag in that you get to see more of it, no such argument can be made for vajazzling – the application of crystals to a freshly waxed vag. This is a long, painful and expensive process by which your vagina is disguised to look like a sparkly clutch purse that you picked up in Penneys for a fiver.
In the US, vaginas are apparently so disgusting that even the word cannot be uttered in public. Earlier this year, Lisa Brown, the representative for Michigan, was banned from taking the Senate floor after she used the term ‘vagina’ – in the context of a discussion about abortion no less. Heavens!
Representative Mike Callton, a Republican from Nashville, weighed in saying, “It was so offensive, I don’t even want to say it in front of women. I would not say that in mixed company.” Break that down – in essence Callton argued that the word vagina is so repugnant that those of us that have them may shudder at the mere mention of one. It seems that in Callton’s view it is only appropriate to use the term in front of men, because well, they’re manly – like vaginas, apparently.
Granted the US Senators may see themselves as lawmakers for the free world, but frankly they’re not the most progressive of corporate bodies. You’d think other sections of society would be happy to hear the term vagina if used in a proper medical context, but you’d be wrong – the popularity of the term ‘vajayjay’ is evidence of that.
Although vajayjay had been knocking around the interwebs for sometime, it took an episode of Grey’s Anatomy to bring it to widespread public consciousness. Shonda Rhimes, the creator and executive producer of the programme was forced to use a slang term after the broadcast authorities took umbrage at the repeated use of ‘vagina’ in an episode where Dr. Miranda Bailey is giving birth. The original script called for Bailey, in the throes of labour, to say to a male intern, “Stop looking at my vagina!”
“Now, we’d once used the word penis 17 times in a single episode and no-one blinked,” Rhimes told the New York Times. “But with vagina, the good folks at broadcast standards and practices blinked over and over and over. I think no-one is comfortable experiencing the female anatomy out loud — which is a shame considering our anatomy is half the population.”
In a medical context – even one faked for television – the use of proper anatomical terms is hardly puerile or gratuitous. Why all the fuss? But to get around the general distaste for the word, Rhimes changed the dialogue so that Bailey now rebuked the intern for looking at her “vajayjay.”
Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley has argued that the term vajayjay caught on rapidly because there was a need for a pet name that was not crude or clinical. Vajayjay is certainly preferable to many slang terms, some of which are either sickly sweet such as flowerpot, or vaguely misogynist like meat pocket and fish taco.
However, as Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard and the author of The Stuff Of Thought: Language As A Window Into Human Nature points out, the repetition of ‘jay jay’ has a childlike quality, similar to ‘pee pee’ or ‘doo doo’. Reverse the gender roles of the Grey’s Anatomy episode and you would have had a fully-grown man, and a doctor no less, complaining to a female intern to, “Stop looking at my pee pee!” Ridiculous? Hell yes.
Given the unfortunate status of the vagina in modern discourse I should have been delighted that someone recently published a book extolling the merits of the female sexual organs. Unfortunately that someone is Naomi Wolf, a celebrity author with vaguely feminist leanings and penchant for using her personal experiences to make generalised pronouncements as if all women were one and the same.
In Vagina: A New Biography Wolf takes as her starting point her recent failure to achieve “technicolour” orgasms. This, she discovers, is due to a trapped spinal nerve, which leads her to the not very startling discovery that the body is one system. From here on in, Wolf interviews all kinds of new-age gurus, self-taught experts and snake oil salesmen – and women – on the mysteries of the cunt.
Wolf has been criticised for her sloppy understanding of science, in particular what she calls the “profound vagina-brain connection.” Wolf essentially argues that the vagina is conscious – uh huh – and that women think and create with their lady bits.
I guess this means I wrote this column with my vagina. Neat! This may please or frighten you, depending on your disposition, but luckily the Hot Press design team are all blokes, and to the best of my knowledge they used Adobe InDesign, not their dicks, to layout the page.
Despite calling her book Vagina, Wolf’s prefers the tantric term ‘yoni’ or ‘goddess’. Wolf visits one Mike Lousada, a former investment banker-turned-sexual healer whose speciality is ‘yoni massage’. Lousada greets Wolf’s lady bits with a cheery, “Welcome, Goddess”, which I imagine would send most women, and our vaginas, scurrying in the opposite direction. It’s meant to be respectful, but instead it comes off as more than a
little creepy.
You can’t help but suspect that Wolf would like us all to return to the bad old pre-science days where being female meant being an inscrutable, unknowable mystery. And we were – but only because doctors were too squeamish to study female anatomy and had to look away while performing gynaecological examinations. Strange, but true.
In a world where women are marketed vaginal ‘rejuvenation’ creams and surgery, vaginal dye for inside and out, vaginal mints to disguise the natural taste, and vaginal douches and deodorants, neither of which are healthy to use, it’s really a pity that Wolf had nothing more than mystical bullshit peddled as revelation to offer us.
Back in the mists of time, folklore warned of the vagina dentate – the toothed vagina. This was to discourage young men from premarital sex and rape. If you’d grown up believing that women had a set of gnashers below you’d be understandably wary about waving your privy member around in the presence of a vagina. However, while sex education, here and across much of the world, is not particularly informative, I doubt very much that anyone believes this nowadays.
It seems to me that once you get over the, ‘Eew, girls are gross’ or ‘boys are gross’ stage of your childhood, you should realise that there is nothing intrinsically disgusting about genitals, male or female. Either you have a vagina or you don’t and you want to get close to them, or you prefer snuggling up with penises. This should mean that you know and like vaginas or they are irrelevant to your life.
Frankly the whole thing makes me mad. Vaginas are great. They are a source of pleasure, necessary to the continuation of the species, and in the end, nothing more than part of the anatomy of half the world. It makes me want to scream from the rooftops, so here goes:
VAGINA! VAGINA! VAGINA!
I feel better now.